Our eventual work on a third edition of the book, released in 2018, challenged us to see how dramatically certain aspects of visual culture had been transformed yet again, in particular in relation to practices of surveillance and to the emergence of a culture in which the consumer’s cultural production—the taking of pictures—had become fully ubiquitous, undoing the binary of consumption and production that had informed the Frankfurt School model, which had been dominant in the late twentieth century. In the 2010s the smartphone, first introduced in 2007, became the primary device for everyday image culture, transforming how, when, and of what people take pictures. Social media and Facebook (founded in 2004), increasingly designed to support still images and video, and Instagram (introduced in 2010 and bought by Facebook in 2012), had sprung up as key sites for sharing images in a market increasing shared by TikTok (founded in 2012). These corporate entities changed the role of images in networks and in the creation of social connection (hence the birth of the selfie). At the same time, image stockpiling and brokering had become high‐stakes big business. And, inexplicably, in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, the art market appeared as an investment option of choice among the “one percent”; thus its elite global art fair and museum culture ascended in tandem with the media, the image, and information‐savvy cultures of movements such as Occupy, the Arab Spring, and Black Lives Matter. We marveled at YouTube’s cultural dominance and at the platform’s success in spawning new genres of its own. This culture of ubiquitous non‐professional image production gave rise to citizen journalism, a phenomenon that continues to undermine the careers of professional journalists but that has made possible witness documentation of police violence and murder of black and brown peoples in the United States, where the Black Lives Matter movement has used witness documentation as a media and legal tool while also raising important concerns about the politics of image‐sharing strategies. Yet the consumer as producer and witness has also shown us the limits and contingencies of “visual power”: such images have thus far failed to secure justice for the victims of police violence, in spite of the recognition that they constitute clear evidence of these acts. In our work on the second edition, and even more so on the third, we aimed to shift the scope of the book so as not only to address the global circulation of images and the global flow of culture, but also to deprovincialize the canon, to move away from its Euro‐American‐centric focus, and to include more work by women artists and artists of color, and to emphasize artists who work on political issues through research‐based practice. This shift entailed, in part, reworking theories of modernity to better account for the literature on postcolonial and settler histories and, in part, tracking new research into image cultures in the movement politics of the 2010s.
Revising the book has never been simply a matter of updating examples or tracking the changes in visual culture on a global scale; it has been about accounting for the changes in theoretical frameworks and orientations with the urgency that situations in the world have demanded of us. We revised and updated our range of theorists and moved the book with the political times. Increasingly, aspects of the theory with which we began needed more critical contextualization; they had to be read as foundational, but also as problematic and limited in relation to contemporary visual culture, as we underwent shifts in the framing of matters of identity, race, class, nationality, sexuality, and ability in relation to visual practice and visuality. We increasingly reworked the canon that we had introduced in the beginning, even as we aimed to expand and revise it.
In the 2010s we also felt that the field itself was shifting toward important new emphases, toward a focus on visuality, countervisuality, visual activism, and decolonial frameworks, much of which Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011, 2016) has taken on in his own work in the field and we have incorporated into the book’s theoretical framework. De‐emphasizing representation as a form of analysis in the book was motivated in part by the recognition that we needed to emphasize fields of visuality, the built environment, and the increasingly constitutive aspects of the visual in fields like science and medicine.
The different editions of the book chart a particular history of the field that has become more institutionalized since we began this project: there are now doctoral programs focused on visual culture (at the University of California, Irvine, Brown University, and New York University); there is a field‐specific journal (the Journal of Visual Culture); and there is a biannual conference with a professional association (the International Association for Visual Culture). In the same way, our own academic affiliations have migrated toward the field. Marita now teaches in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, which places a strong emphasis on visual culture through such scholars as Nicholas Mirzoeff, Allen Feldman, Erica Robles‐Anderson, and Kelli Moore, for example. Lisa is now on the faculty of the Visual Arts Department at the University of California San Diego, where she teaches with Rochester program founder Norman Bryson and with Grant Kester, who received his PhD from that program, with science, art, and film historian Alena Williams, with activist artist Ricardo Dominguez, and with pictures generation artist Amy Adler, among others. San Diego’s visual arts curriculum combines art and media practice, theory, history, and criticism, and the department offers one of the few art practice PhD concentrations in art history in the United States. In a certain sense, we have inadvertently contributed to an institutionalization of the field—which, as these trajectories can attest, was the least of our concerns when we first began writing a book together in the late 1990s. It is our hope that, in the current political climate of 2020—when we revise and update this contribution amid a global viral pandemic and a national uprising against epidemic police violence directed at black and brown people—our book may be useful to artists and scholars who are hoping to act and make changes in ways that engage and resist visuality in its relationship to meaning and power. We persisted with the book as toolkit for action and engagement, a role that we hope it will continue to serve.
References
1 Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin.
2 Gee, Gabriel. 2017. Art in the North of England, 1979–2008. London: Routledge.
3 Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
4 Harris, Jonathan P. 2001. The New Art History: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge.
5 Jõekalda, Kristina. 2013. “What Has Become of the New Art History?” Journal of Art Historiography 9: 1–7.
6 Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The Right to Look. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
7 Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2016. How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, from Self‐Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More. New York: Basic Books.
8 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2002. Touching Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
9 Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. 2018. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, 3rd edn. New York: Oxford University Press.
Chapter 2 Horizontal Thinking and the Emergence of Visual Culture
Louis Kaplan
New Horizons
If one looks to the horizon, then one discerns a key element in the emergence of visual culture in the Anglo‐American context during the mid‐twentieth century. In helping to set the scene, I would like to offer some reflections on the importance and implications of the figure of horizontality and of thinking horizontally in a few critical texts foundational to visual cultural studies. In these texts, horizontality is championed and idealized as the level playing field or democratic ground for the constitution of visual cultural meaning, and often in direct opposition to what it is condemned as art history’s insistence on hierarchies and its elitist positioning.